Quotes About Ethics

Când intr? în joc st?pânirea lucrurilor p?mânteÅŸti, e foarte greu ca oamenii s? gândeasc? aÅŸa cum cere dreptatea.

La ilegitimidad es algo de lo que tenemos que hablar en términos de no tenerla»

Porque la ciencia no consiste sólo en saber lo que debe o puede hacerse, sino también en saber lo que podría hacerse aunque quizá no debiera hacerse.

often the step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is very brief

I'd never understood whether the vogue for apologising is a sign of humility of impudence: you do something you shouldn't have done, then you apologise and wash your hands of it.

Sería atroz —comentó Guillermo— matar a un hombre para decir Credo in unum Deum…

One doesn't commit evil actions in the belief that one is acting wrongly. What allows one to commit such acts is the belief that it will contribute to a greater good.

The Prime Directive is a nice ideal, but have you noticed it never works in practice?

He was thinking about the boy who cried wolf. Honesty is the best policy. Wasn't that the moral of the story, according to Julian Bashir? Or was it: Never tell the same lie twice.

she was standing upon the brink of the pit of hell and throwing in snowballs to lower the temperature.

All of this might seem diabolical, but the saloon-keeper was in no wise to blame for it. He was in the same plight as the manufacturer who has to adulterate and misrepresent his product. If he does not, some one else will.

the man who told tales and spied upon his fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own business and did his work—why, they would speed him up till they had worn him out, and then they would throw him into the gutter.

What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the purchaser of meat.

We have a flabby public opinion which would wring its hands in anguish if we took the labor leader by the scruff of his neck, backed him up against a wall, and filled him with lead. Countries which consider themselves every bit as civilized as we do not hesitate about such matters for a moment. Whenever

But both of them had been business men all their lives and would take it for granted that their duty to the stockholders of Budd-Erling outweighed any duty they might owe to truth, justice, humanity, or any other glittering generality.

Newspapermen are human, and cannot be blamed by their owners if now and then they yield to the temptation to publish the news.

The father kept two compartments in his mind, one for things that were right, and the other for things that existed, and which you had to allow to exist, and to defend, in a queer, half-hearted, but stubborn way. But here was this new phenomenon, a boy's mind which was all one compartment; things ought to be right, and if they were not right, you ought to make them right, or else what was the use of having any right—you were only fooling yourself about it.

On vaikeaa saada ihminen ymmärtämään jotain, kun hänen palkkana riippuu siitä, ettei hän ymmärrä.

And you won't need any assurance that I agree with you about Hearst. He is one of the most unscrupulous and most dangerous men in America. He stops at nothing to get his way. And there are many like him.

The world had always done its utmost to spoil Lanny Budd, and his conscience gave him no rest about it; the more luxury he enjoyed, the more he hated the system of exploitation on which that luxury was based.

You know the old doctrine that the end justifies the means. I was reading some modern philosopher the other day and noted the statement that it is the means that determine the end.

Lanny Budd was the son and grandson and great-grandson of merchants of death; he had been born and reared and educated on money made by the manufacture and sale of instruments of death; he was flying now in a warplane, upon an errand of war, even though he persuaded himself, as men do, that it was one of peace. He asked himself whether man was doomed because he could not deliver himself from the curse of war.

For when you let down the bars and admitted the right to lie and to cheat, you were undermining the very bases upon which human societies are built. Particularly when you admitted the right of political parties to lie and cheat, for how, then, could anybody have faith in them? How could their own followers know what they were or what they would become?

a sort of Frankenstein creation known as "the economic man," and a deity known as "laissez faire," which meant in cruder language "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost.